Entertainment

I AM BLOCKBUSTER

MANHATTAN, five years from now. The island is overrun by hordes of frighteningly malformed brain-damaged mouth-breathers (though unlike today’s crowds they are not carrying maps and asking directions to Applebee’s). On the plus side of 2012: According to “I Am Legend,” it will then be OK to shoot these people with high-powered rifles.

Will Smith stars as the Last Man on Earth in a scary, inventive, exciting and breathless adventure that combines the best elements of “Children of Men,” “Escape from New York” and “The Road Warrior,” but leaves out the worst stuff – such as the story-clogging despair and political allegory in “Children,” a movie that made apocalypse look like kind of a downer.

“I Am Legend” is also a re-remake of 1964’s Vincent Price film “The Last Man on Earth” and “The Omega Man,” the 1971 Charlton Heston flick shot in an LA empty of all intelligent life. (Just crack your own joke here.)

In a prologue, we learn that in 2009 there will be a cure for cancer. One or two unintended consequences later, a virus as noxious as the Knicks front office hangs in the air while everyone in Manhattan desperately tries to flee. Soldiers stop people at checkpoints in a nightmarish vision of hell that, if you added about 12,000 spaghetti straps and some $350 bottles of vodka, would closely resemble the Meatpacking District on a Friday night.

After all of this, Smith’s Lt. Col. Neville, an expert in viruses, weaponry and survival skills who has also found time to memorize large portions of “Shrek,” is alone in the city, immune to the retrovirus. Every day he leaves his Washington Square digs (decorated in a sort of House and Fortress scheme that involves retractable barricades and van Goghs liberated from museums) to forage for supplies with his German shepherd, Sam, racing his Mustang around spectacular vistas of a New York overgrown by weeds and ravaged by flooding.

Herds of wildlife run free, and tanks and cars are jammed together in phalanxes of steel. At night, Neville must take cover: That’s when the zombies, or “Night Seekers,” come out to moan more loudly than striking screenwriters – and they’re hungry for more than just residuals.

In other words, Neville’s life, though lonely, is also kind of fun. Who wouldn’t enjoy limitless time to bathe his dog, watch every DVD in the video store and hit golf balls off an aircraft carrier in the Hudson River as though acting out the apocalypse according to Kramer? I personally could use six to nine months of post-human void just to catch up on old copies of The New Yorker and contemplate eternal mysteries of human existence, such as why everyone thought “Babel” was so great.

C’mon, how can you beat deer hunting on Central Park South from the window of a speeding Mustang, especially when you’ve got an assault rifle and every PETA activist has long since been devoured by carnivores?

This movie is going to be bigger than crucifix sales on Judgment Day, and the main lesson Hollywood should learn from it is that if you’re going to show the end of the world, try to look on the bright side. Neville isn’t just wandering around playing kill-or-be-killed with the zombies or, worse, stomping on the allegory pedal so we’ll be sure to walk away thinking someone like Dick Cheney was behind all this.

Neville is trying to develop an antidote to the virus, one that could re verse the effects of the disease and turn these ag gressively hos tile semi- human shriek ers into de cent human beings, or at least some thing that screams no more than the average celebrity publicist. He needs to get out and interact with the zombies (and even zombie rats), injecting them with compounds derived from his own immune blood.

Which certainly ensures he gets plenty of exercise: The zombies are clever enough to imitate his own methods for capturing them, and if he lingers outdoors for one second past dusk, they’ll be on him like telemarketers at dinner time.

The allegory that does come into play, meanwhile, is so unexpected for this era that it’s refreshing (although 50 years ago the same idea would have been cliché). “I Am Legend” says that when it comes to seeking scientific solutions for the world’s self-inflicted miseries, it wouldn’t hurt to ask God for a clue.

kyle.smith@nypost.com

I AM LEGEND
Good Will hunting.
Running time: 100 minutes. Rated PG-13 (scary images and violence). At the Empire, the Union Square,

the Kips Bay, others.